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Esports tournaments are forever growing both in size and maturity. The latest tournament to start is a testament to that. The Overwatch League, brainchild of World of Warcraft developers Blizzard Entertainment, is a professional esports league where teams are fighting it out in weekly matches for a share of the $3.5 million prize pool.

The format is a similar to what you’d expect from any professional sports league, if a little more global. Twelve teams representing cities from around the world are split across two divisions, Pacific and Atlantic, facing off twice a week for points in the league table. The top six then move on to the playoffs, fighting to become the Overwatch League's inaugural champions.

For the uninitiated, Overwatch is a team-based first-person shooter, where two teams of six choose ‘heroes’ to play as, each with their own unique skills and abilities, and complete objectives on different maps while blasting away at their foes.

Some heroes, like the giant knight Reinhardt, are 'tanks', built like the locks of rugby union, made to withstand the enemy’s force and allow more nimble players to shine. Others are supports like the angelic Mercy, healing allies, while many offensive and defensive players, like the pistol-wielding cowboy McCree or the sniper Widowmaker, are designed to eliminate enemy players with high damage guns and abilities.

For newcomers, the variety of characters is by far the hardest thing to get used to when watching the Overwatch League. For anyone who is a regular player at home, it all comes naturally, but if you are new to the game, it is perhaps a set of rules that you can’t instantly pick up. Everyone’s role is not dictated by something like a position on the field, but the character they’ve chosen to play as.

The UK is represented by London Spitfire, who have began the season in fine form

But, again taking inspiration from traditional sports broadcasts, the Overwatch League's replays show the biggest moments from different camera angles. The commentators draw your attention to the most important things going on, and analysts are best-in-class for unpicking strategies, successes, and failures.

The games so far have been action-packed, too. It’s too early in the season to really make any bold claims, but three teams: London Spitfire, New York Excelsior, and Seoul Dynasty, have proven themselves to be the front-runners winning all four of their opening matches in convincing style. For those at home, matches are streamed every weekend from Wednesday to Saturday live on Twitch, after Blizzard and the streaming channel struck a record $90m broadcasting deal for esports. It is also watchable through a mobile app and the official site, which also has previous games available to watch on-demand.

It all takes place in the Blizzard Arena in Los Angeles, a converted TV studio complete with cameras for the audience, VIP boxes for team owners and giant LED screens that both help it look more professional and show off the enormous amount of money that has gone into the Overwatch League.

In person, the arena itself isn’t as large as it appears on-camera --there is space for 530 spectators and you don’t quite get the cavernous roar of a stadium in a TV studio-- but it creates a splendid atmosphere nonetheless. The crowd gasps in awe as the LED screens light up to show off the maps teams would play on, and for the people watching at home, it looks bright, professional, and clean.

Spectators cheer on the teams at the Blizzard Arena

And when something spectacular during a match, the crowd cheer wildly in response. It’s surely something that will only improve as time goes on, particularly as teams foster communities and create their own identities, but simply having a crowd roaring in appreciation when a player does well is exactly what you need - watching a video game might not sound fascinating to the unfamiliar, but it is unlikely you could resist being drawn in when there is 400 excitable fans around you.

That translates over to the experience if you’re watching from home, too. Just hearing the crowd adds a lot to the experience, something esports tournaments have learned to appreciate over the years. In many ways, that’s what the Overwatch League is: the culmination of the many lessons the esports industry has learned about how to show a video game to an audience.

The commentators, for example, or more like a sports show than anything, bridging the line between the information you already know (or you’re expected to know) and an in-depth knowledge, with desk analysts going over key moments between games. They are the frontline of many fixes the Overwatch League has in place for the difficult task of explaining competitive gaming.

Expert commentators describe the action on the casting desk

When presenting a video game, one of the first challenges is in perspective. Traditionally, in-game spectators acted as the camera operators, an invisible force dictating what was seen - for the Overwatch League, there is a team of six spectators, each transitioning from eye-in-the-sky cameras to the first-person perspectives of individual players.

On the one hand, the latter is fascinating. Imagine seeing a football player’s perspective as they run up for a penalty, or a tennis player’s perspective as they serve. It is perhaps an insight that more traditional sport cannot impart, but it’s also unstable, constantly wobbling and jerking from side to side, giving you a limited field of view.

Much of the games are broadcast from this perspective, meaning that if you’re not used the first-person video games, it’s jarring, and many of visual cues don’t translate to someone new. There is a top-down view of the whole map, which lacks all detail, and a third person camera, which goes sadly underused - for the most part, perspective jumps from person to person, looking through their eyes.

It is in these ways that Overwatch won’t be able to convince all sports fans to start watching. Despite the people involved (New York Excelsior, one of the teams, is owned by the New York Mets’ COO Jeff Wilpon, for example), and despite the professionalism in these broadcasts: it’s still a video game and not everyone knows how to watch that. The Overwatch League still has some work to do on that front and it will be fascinating to see how Blizzard approach these challenges as the season progresses

But for the fans of Overwatch, and the 10 million people Blizzard claim watched the Overwatch League’s opening weekend, it is pretty much everything they could have wanted. There are certainly other issues for the league to tackle - the team rosters are all male, raising questions of accessibility and openness, the league has yet to publish rules and a code of conduct, and retaining that audience through the season is a challenge we are yet to see the results of.

Surely it will improve, and there is a real chance that the more casual viewer is not the audience for the Overwatch League yet. Having a 10 million-strong opening weekend, though, is proof that it’s ticked the right boxes for those who are already converted to the esports revolution.